Police Regulation, Working Class Life

The rapid democratization of political life following the February revolution in Paris out paced police
regulation until Louis Napoleon Bonaparte's coup d'état of December 1851. Recently historians,
such as Maurice Agulhon, John Merriman, and Ted Margadant have shown that a dialectic of revolution and repression
unfolded after February 1848. Innovations in political organization elicited novelties in governmental repression.
As a result, state brutality became more overt while political organization became more clandestine. Only Louis
Napoleon Bonaparte's coup d'état in December was able to break this cycle. This event sparked the final
armed insurrection in French history and represented the last sustained nationwide attempt at conspiratorial
politics. The growing sophistication of police regulation and governmental repression over the period 1848-1851
insured that these forms of collective action were now obsolete.

February 1848 produced the greatest political and social eruption since 1789. The immediate proclamation of freedom
of the press and of assembly and association brought an avalanche of newspapers, clubs, and associations. To
facilitate the exercise of these freedoms the revolutionary government refashioned the administrative and police
machinery and removed much of the Orléanist personnel. Urban revolutionaries and workers were the first
to benefit from this transformation. Only in 1849 did radicalism begin to make effective inroads into rural life.

Even before repression of the Paris workers during June 1848, governmental authorities in the emerging "party of
order" began to build the police apparatus that would eventually stifle this revolutionary process. The press and
the political clubs were their first target. The unsuccessful demonstration of June 13 served as a pretext for a
series of new restrictive press laws by June 25. In August the legislators required papers put aside caution money
to pay governmental fines. Over the following three years increases in newspaper taxes and broadened definitions of
sedition would hobble the popular press. A decree of July 28, 1848 reimposed close government supervision on clubs.
Within a year, a law of June 19, 1849 severely restricted the right to association. Finally, the laws of July 1849
banned clubs and all political associations, and an amendment in 1850 required police at all gatherings. Political
expression at banquets became the target of governmental repression in an 1850 law. The electoral franchise then
became the focus. The law of May 1850 cut the number of voters by over one third. The party of order
also struck against traveling salespeople who often peddled politics along with their products. Newspaper vendors
also came under a close supervision in a law of July 1849 that dramatically reduced their number from 30,000 to 500
by 1874.

These measures laid the foundation for the dissolution of republican groups such as Solidarité
Republicaine and Comité pour la propagande democratique et social in the same year. These
repressive measures drove the Republican dem-soc movement underground. Agulhon, Merriman, and Margadant also have
shown how the era of the clubs was followed by the age of the private clubs (chambrées) cafés,
cooperatives, and secret societies. Merriman persuasively argued that these measures destroyed the dem-soc movement
in urban France by the time of Louis Napoleon Bonaparte's coup d'état in December 1851. Margadant and Thomas
R. Forstenzer maintained that similar success was not achieved in the countryside. Instead, by 1851, a national
conspiratorial network had penetrated into French village life, especially in the center and the south. Repression
in these areas had produced exactly what the authorities had feared: an underground they could only dimly perceive.
The initial repression had removed the upper and middle class patrons, usually lawyers, journalists, or doctors,
from the movement. As a result, lower middle and working-class people had taken leadership positions. Thus, the
police could no longer rely on intelligence gathered among the notables in towns and cities. Vertical solidarities
replaced horizontal ones, and word of mouth took the place of the increasingly restricted press. In addition, the
organizational structure shifted from electoral committees under bourgeois patronage to clandestine societies led by
shopkeepers, artisans, or farmers (cultivateurs). In these small agglomerated villages, halfway between urban and
rural life and often mediating the two, mayors and municipal councils often sided with their fellow villagers against
their official superiors. The central government then turned to the police commissioners. Although they had rarely
exercised any political responsibilities before 1848, by December 1851 they had become the important agents of
centralized administration beyond the seats of the sub-prefectures. Their police powers now extended throughout
the cantons, not just in the commune. But they too proved unable to pierce their veil of village solidarities.

The coup d'état finally brought this cycle to an end. But it did so only by declaring a state
of siege in thirty-two departments, mainly in the south and east, which suspended normal police and judicial
processes. The mobile columns of soldiers, gendarmes, and police that terrorized populations and arrested
large numbers highlighted the failure of local intelligence and the recalcitrance of ordinary courts. The
special administrative tribunals setup to judge the 26,884 cases brought before them contained a prefect, police
prosecutor, and a general. These mixed commissions solved the problem of harmonizing military and civilian
interests. These extraordinary judicial investigations, which did not bother with legal niceties, obtained
sworn depositions from suspects, and the resulting documentation enabled the army and police to dismantle
most of the underground networks. The scale of this action far exceeded any other police measures versus
political activities in rural France in the nineteenth century and its arbitrariness guaranteed its success
as it sliced the vertical ties that had held the secret societies together. But, as Forstenzer has cogently
argued, these were not neurotic witch hunters with a blind and indiscriminate rage but instead frustrated,
moralistic bureaucrats dedicated to imposing their image of order.

The Second Empire consolidated many of these police state innovations. Both urban and rural police forces were
now almost double what they had been in 1830. In 1854 the Parisian police would introduce the system of beat
policing, in imitation of the London system, to assure a more systematic and continuous system of surveillance.
Most important under Napoleon III the government instituted a central police file. As politicization entered
daily life, police surveillance became more minute and more rigorous.